Barack Obama Interview

Barack and I posing for a photo.
Today I had the pleasure of sitting in on a small closed door interview with Presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama. I was lucky enough to get my name pulled for the drawing at work (the Keene Sentinel newspaper) to attend (quietly and in the back) of the interview with about a dozen people.

The interview lasted for just over an hour and the entire video of it (yes there's video even though it's a newspaper) is online. If you look closely you can see me in the back right, and if you are even more astute, you can notice the lady in front of me nodding off now and again.

I really enjoyed the interview because:
a) It got me out of my menial work tasks for about 2 hours.
b) It was inspiring to see/meet/hear a Presidential candidate.
c) Towards the end he says "crush my opponents"

He included a lot of talk about reform (health insurance, education, FDA, lobbying, etc.) which I liked. In fact, most of what he said I liked which made me start to wonder if it was all too good to be true. I want to watch more of the interviews they've done so far to see if everyone is too good to be true. I'm young, naive, passionate, idealistic, etc. and new to the game of presidential elections (only having impact on 2 so far), but I know that promises are always made and promises are always broken.

There was some talk about the differences of civil unions and marriages which was not discussed completely. The whole "if there is a separation of church and state, why does there need to be a different term for same sex marriages in the eyes of the government when it has nothing to do with the religious community" argument was something that he didn't want to get into. Murky water indeed that would no doubt cause a lot of unrest for him - people find it easier to accept gays in unions than marriages - but are there any candidates that are actually proposing the use of only one of the terms for both same-sex and heterosexual couples? I'm not sure. I think all marriages should be considered as civil unions by the government and marriage should be used as a personal/religious term that people can choose to use or not. Anyway, I'm not going to get into that now.

After the interview I introduced myself saying my grandfather-in-law was a close friend of Charles Ogletree, Obama's former Harvard Professor and mentor at Harvard. He asked me how they were associated and when I said he was the President of the NAACP on Martha's Vineyard it earned me a pat on the back.

For the record - a pat on the back from a Presidential candidate trumps a handshake from a Presidential candidate any day of the week.

Candidates interviewed so far at the paper (since I started in Sept '07):
* John Edwards
* Hillary Clinton
* Barack Obama
* John McCain (next week)